VETERAN FOLK GUITARIST : ERIC ANDERSEN’S AIMING AT BETTER, NOT BIGGER

Eric Andersen was part of the same Greenwich Village folk scene that spawned Bob Dylan and Joan Baez in the early 1960s.

In the ensuing years, many of his contemporaries have gone on to bigger and better things. Andersen, on the other hand, seems caught in a time warp. More than two decades after he first gained favor among the stringy-haired beatnik set with introspective songs such as “Violets of Dawn,” “Thirsty Boots” and “Be True to You,” he’s the same errant guitar-strumming minstrel he always was.

He still travels the world in search of things to write about, such as the street musicians of Brussels (“The Singing Man”) and his grandfather’s hometown in Norway (“Eyes of the Immigrant”).

He still studies poetry by Ezra Pound and the French symbolists Rimbaud and Baudelaire for inspiration.

He continues to tour the country and perform his new works, accompanied only by his acoustic guitar, in tiny folk clubs and coffee houses like the Old Time Cafe in Leucadia, where he’ll appear tonight --on his 43rd birthday.

And he insists he doesn’t envy his better-known counterparts in the least.

“There are always going to be people who make it big, and then there are those of us who keep plugging along, just doing our best,” Andersen said by phone from his New York City home.

“And who knows? Maybe it’s going to be like the tortoise and the hare--I’ll keep moving along, doing what I’ve always done, and then maybe one day I’ll get the cover of Time magazine.”

Not that he really cares. Andersen swears he’s perfectly happy to continue honing his songwriting skills and writing for such better-known artists as Judy Collins, Johnny Cash and Linda Ronstadt--even the Grateful Dead--while becoming involved in a variety of more esoteric projects all over the world.

He spent three months last year in Brussels, writing the score for a new film starring Brad Dourif of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” fame. Before that, he was in Canada, recording a solo album with members of avant-gardist Brian Eno’s band.

Three times a year, he hits the road for a month or two at a time. And on the rare occasions that he’s home in New York, he spends his days working on a book of short stories and his nights playing club dates at places like The Bottom Line and Folk City with such disparate musicians as Al Green’s bassist, Rickie Lee Jones’ harmonica player and Anthony Braxton’s pianist.

“I can’t compete with the Rolling Stones,” Andersen said. “They’ve done it already. The same with Bob Dylan. So what I’m trying to do is find other ways of making it in this business that aren’t necessarily part of the mainstream.

“And most of all, I’m concerned with becoming a better song writer. I’m better now than I’ve ever been, and all these different projects are certainly broadening my outlook and giving me more to draw from.”

Andersen was born in Pittsburgh and raised in Buffalo. Always a fan of such folk progenitors as Woody Guthrie and Huddie (Leadbelly) Ledbetter, he taught himself guitar when he was 12 and fronted folk groups in high school.

He briefly studied medicine at Hobart College but soon became engrossed with the literary beat movement that sprang up in the late 1950s.

After two years at Hobart, he dropped out and jumped a freight train to San Francisco, where he spent several years hanging out with Alan Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Neal Casady (the real “Dean Moriarty” in the classic Jack Kerouac novel, “On the Road”).

By the early 1960s, Andersen recalled, the beat movement had become closely intertwined with the folk revival then happening in Greenwich Village. So he once again picked up his guitar and began playing Bay Area coffee houses, at one point playing in a folk duo with Janis Joplin.

In 1963, he returned to the East Coast and soon became a mainstay of the Greenwich Village folk scene. Within a year, he had landed a recording deal with Vanguard Records, at the time also the home of Joan Baez, and his star rose quickly.

“But while everyone else was writing topical songs about the political issues of the day, I was more of a romantic writer,” Andersen recalled. “I was writing about the interior landscape of the country--the people, the places, the stories--rather than the political scene.

“And maybe that’s why I’ve never left my folk roots. Issues change, almost day to day, and that’s why nearly everyone else eventually went on to something else. But the kinds of things I wrote about then, like walking around the streets of New York at night (in the song ‘Violets of Dawn’), are as relevant today as they ever were.

“I try to take people on little journeys; I want them to be able to close their eyes and take a trip with each of my songs. I’m not a preacher, I’m a storyteller, and storytelling is as old as folk music itself.”